Bartleby, the Sportscaster - Ted Pelton

Praise for Bartleby, the Sportscaster

Pelton’s modern cover of this great 1853 American novella makes the mind toggle from Pelton to Melville and back. In the middle of this read a moving personal digression honors the universality of the iconic Melville story. Ah humanity! You speculate about Bartleby the Waitress, Bartleby the Bus Driver, Bartleby the Ticket Seller, and you burrow into the lonely faceless steeps of American night. This is a wonderful homage, humane and readable, an engrossing take on an oracular Melville work

~ STEVE KATZ

Tod Pelton has written an allegory about an allegory about real life. The memoir of the end of his first marriage, sandwiched between chapters about a fictional sportscaster and his silent colleague, Bartleby, offers us a sober frame for interpreting the fiction (his and Melville's). More importantly, perhaps, fictions gives us access to the life. Bartleby is real; marriage is an allegory. Vice versa, too. Neither life nor art can be imitated in Pelton's novel, for they are one and the same.

~ SUSAN M. SCHULTZ

On the surface, Ted Pelton's novells Bartleby, the Sportscaster is a redaction of Melville's short story, moved forward by a century and into a baseball park—young Bartleby (first name, or perhaps last name, unknown) is a hollow-eyed Asperger's-spectrum savant of baseball statistics and nothing else who, invading the life of veteran sportscaster Ray Yarzejski, becomes an object of fascination through his inertia and passive certainty. In a meta-fictional aside the Author reveals how Bartleby's life and Yarzejski's are resonant with the history of his former wife, whose literary promise sank under an irretrievable passivity toward quietude, stillness, nothing. In the end, we remember not the post-modern conceits but how, after Bartleby is lost in a carceral labyrinth of Kafka-esque for-profit prisons, Yerzejski, who is powerless, and ruined, decides to find him, and fails, and always keeps looking.

~ ZACHARY MASON

Pelton's novella mixes baseball, culture, and Melville with a postmodern wink . The results are surprisingly, comic, multilayered, and utterly unique.

~ STACEY LEVINE